Jeff, I see you read and quoted from the Robert Forstner piece (or peas). Did you read the comments on that piece?
Several gentlemen actively working in NLP took serious issue with his claims about the field flat-lining, specifically criticizing the study that claimed 80% accuracy. I quote: "State of the art wide coverage parsers are currently sitting around 88-95% accuracy, not 80%, with >99% coverage (meaning a successful, though possibly incorrect, parse of 99% of unlabelled unrestricted text)."
Consider taking another look and possibly involving some additional sources - you have a widely-read blog, and it would be a shame to pass on misinformation.
See also: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/bzbdf/rest_in_peas_the_unrecognized_death_of_speech/

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